Oh for god's sake, why? WHY? Why was this poor child's privacy and well-being not guarded from the very beginning? WHY DO I AND HALF THE WORLD NOW KNOW HER NAME, and not for her ability?! I don't care what she looks like to anybody else, she is 18, she is a little girl.

I hate that the sporting, I don't know, establishmentworks that way. If we think that an athlete is underage, or drugged up, or from the wrong country, or not really a woman, why is it that we always wait until well after the fact, when there is a win and tons of publicity, to start questioning and publicly humiliating these young people? Why do we wait til there's a huge win? It's such a cynical, sour-grapes-looking display, and I don't see why they can't put some effort into confirming these thing BEFOREHAND.

A while back I saw a TV (PBS, I think?) special about another Muslim girl, in the Netherlands, who was a major soccer/football scorer and the secondary-school level. Wish I could remember where I saw it...

Don't get me wrong. I fully and firmly believe that the Chinese women's gymnastics team is made up of at least half prepubescents who are 13 if they're a day. And no, I am not okay with that.

But jeeze, Olympics committee -- would it not have been far less lame to investigate this BEFORE all the pain and stress of the actual competition? Spare her family -- and more important, the child herself -- from humiliation?

Why is public defrocking better than private(ish) disqualification?

I mean really, whatcha gonna do now, start the games over? Or just embarrass a little kid internationally for obeying her parents and government?

How about this: do away with the stupid age block. Serious gymnasts, like ballet dancers, start training at 3, 4, and 5 years old. This new competition age limit is not doing a damn thing to curb abuses and harmful mindsets that are already in place a decade earlier.

Or is it somehow more acceptable for a Chelsie Memmel or a Betty Okino to compete on a broken ankle (SPINE*) -- to think she has to compete on a broken ankle (SPINE) -- just because she's a few years older?

One of the best things about the Olympics, to me, is watching kids from "enemy" nations smile at one another, hug one another, hold on to one another, like people -- like peers. The sweat and pain they put into their sport and their dream unites them -- which is a power like no obscure governmental squabble could have to unite or separate. It's concrete, physical, and real.